Flash 9 for FreeBSD 7.1 (howto)

Flash 9 for FreeBSD at last! And I don’t mean having to run a Windows or Linux browser — Flash 9 in native Firefox 3. FreeBSD’s linux emulation layer has undergone some upgrades recently, and as of FreeBSD 7.1 it is able to provide enough kernel support to get the linux Flash player version 9 running. Very good indeed, and hopefully it’ll hold us out until Adobe create official native FreeBSD support (assuming that rumour comes true). Note: this only works on i386 and AMD64 platforms.

Comments

Thank you very much for spreading the word and, in general for this site. The lack of (near-) native flash support was especially difficult during recent US elections, when so much of campaigning has moved to candidates’ sites & places like Youtube.

I look forward to an open form of flash… one day. Until then, this is very good news.

And this would be a solution that makes Firefox only crash 15 times a day? My experience with running the Flash plugin as a Linux plugin for Firefox, or by running Linux Firefox with the Linux plugin, is that it is not stable at all. :-(

Every once in a while my Firefox hangs — about every 4-5th YouTube video. Because npviewer.bin — the Linux executable that’s loading libflashplayer.so so your browser does not
have to — either crashes (signal 11) or hangs.

Performing “killall nvpiewer.bin” unhangs firefox (without the video). I can then press “reload” (sometimes — twice) and get the video working.

I’ve heard people suggesting, certain codecs break under FreeBSD, but if that were the problem, it wouldn’t be working upon page reload either.

That’s good news, but perhaps better news is that gnash is almost ready for prime time. Gnash is open source, so no Linux emulation required, and it won’t be limited to x86 systems, or to platforms blessed by Adobe.

I just set up gnash on my DesktopBSD laptop in about 10 minutes following the instructions at:

It’s a little rough on the edges, but I can watch most youtube videos and some historically annoying WEB sites with flash content work fine now.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the gnash project for about a year now, and it’s moving pretty fast. I’ll go out on a limb by saying that I think gnash is the future for *nix. ( At least as long as Flash is alive. )

I have 2 machines – an old PIII running
FreeBSD 7.1 and a Windows laptop running
Windows XP. Now that I have this set up
I use the FreeBSD box as a desktop more
often because I am not as limited on the web!

No, it doesn’t work anymore, because nspluginwrapper does no longer build because of linux-f8-pango
which has known vulnerabilities since many weeks.
I don’t like setting ‘DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes’ to override the problem.
No help in sight?